The entire plain, for a distance of more than ten leagues, became an immense lake of flame, in the midst of which the Indians, half naked, looked like so many demons, leaping and brandishing their arms, and uttering cries like wild beasts.
The Brazilian troops—entrenched on the hill where they had established their camp, circled by an impenetrable wall of fire, kept up a continual and well-sustained fire on the Indians, not in the hope of conquering them, but so that they might die bravely, and make their wild and implacable enemies pay dearly for their victory.
Zeno Cabral gave the order to halt, to allow their horses to regain their wind.
They stopped. The Brazilians still fought, or at least they continued to fire, for they had no longer any enemy; the Indians were flying in all directions, in their turn pursued by the fire which they had themselves lighted.
Suddenly a frightful explosion was heard; an immense cloud of dust, fragments of rock, and broken trees, rose in the air to a prodigious height, and fell with a crash.
The Brazilians had disappeared. They had fired the powder, and had blown themselves up, to put an end to this horrible tragedy.